RaveBroadlyAfter stumbling upon 22 boxes of Smith Friedman’s personal files at the George C. Marshall library in West Virginia, writer Jason Fagone spent three years researching her life. The resulting work of literary nonfiction, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, is a triumph ...an account of one woman’s remarkable life during a remarkable historical period, but it’s also a simple love story ...literally transporting. It takes you to a pre-NSA world before mass intelligence, when the FBI was taking down Al Capone, and Treasury officials and federal agents would turn up on the doorstep of Mrs. Friedman — as she was universally known to the government spooks — to solve their puzzles ...full of characters who merit entire biographies in their own right... Fagone excels in describing those who powered the war effort but received scarce glory.
